Page 1 of 1 [ 6 posts ] 

gina-ghettoprincess
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 8 Nov 2008
Age: 28
Gender: Female
Posts: 2,669
Location: The Town That Time Forgot (UK)

27 Apr 2009, 11:18 am

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8020039.stm

Quote:
Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.

The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services.

The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites.

The Tories said the Home Office had "buckled under Conservative pressure" in deciding against a giant database.

Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications data and its use in law enforcement, Jacqui Smith said there would be no single government-run database.

But she also said that "doing nothing" in the face of a communications revolution was not an option.

The Home Office will instead ask communications companies - from internet service providers to mobile phone networks - to extend the range of information they currently hold on their subscribers and organise it so that it can be better used by the police, MI5 and other public bodies investigating crime and terrorism.

Ministers say they estimate the project will cost £2bn to set up, which includes some compensation to the communications industry for the work it may be asked to do.

"Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers, paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime," Ms Smith said.

"Advances in communications mean that there are ever more sophisticated ways to communicate and we need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who seek to do us harm.

"It is essential that the police and other crime fighting agencies have the tools they need to do their job, However to be clear, there are absolutely no plans for a single central store."

Communication service providers (CSPs) will be asked to record internet contacts between people, but not the content, similar to the existing arrangements to log telephone contacts.

Security services could then seek to examine this data along with information which links it to specific devices, such as a mobile phone, home computer or other device, as part of investigations into criminal suspects.

The plan expands a voluntary arrangement under which CSPs allow security services to access some data which they already hold.

The security services already deploy advanced techniques to monitor telephone conversations or intercept other communications, but this is not used in criminal trials.

Ms Smith said that while the new system could record a visit to a social network, it would not record personal and private information such as photos or messages posted to a page.

"What we are talking about is who is at one end [of a communication] and who is at the other - and how they are communicating," she said.

Existing legal safeguards under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act would continue to apply. Requests to see the data would require top level authorisation within a public body such as a police force. The Home Office is running a separate consultation on limiting the number of public authorities that can access sensitive information or carry out covert surveillance.

'Orwellian'

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: "I am pleased that the Government has climbed down from the Big Brother plan for a centralised database of all our emails and phone calls.

"However, any legislation that requires individual communications providers to keep data on who called whom and when will need strong safeguards on access.

"It is simply not that easy to separate the bare details of a call from its content. What if a leading business person is ringing Alcoholics Anonymous, or a politician's partner is arranging to hire a porn video?

"There has to be a careful balance between investigative powers and the right to privacy."

"It is good that the home secretary appears to have listened to Conservative warnings about big brother databases. Now that she has finally admitted that the public don't want their details held by the State in one place, perhaps she will look at other areas in which the Government is trying to do precisely that."

Guy Herbert of campaign group NO2ID said: "Just a week after the home secretary announced a public consultation on some trivial trimming of local authority surveillance, we have this: a proposal for powers more intrusive than any police state in history.

"Ministers are making a distinction between content and communications data into sound-bite of the year. But it is spurious.

"Officials from dozens of departments and quangos could know what you read online, and who all your friends are, who you emailed, when, and where you were when you did so - all without a warrant."

The consultation runs until 20 July 2009.


_________________
'El reloj, no avanza
y yo quiero ir a verte,
La clase, no acaba
y es como un semestre"


SilverPikmin
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 1 Aug 2008
Age: 33
Gender: Male
Posts: 360
Location: Merseyside, England, UK

27 Apr 2009, 4:08 pm

The invasion of privacy in this country [the UK] worries me. We have the most CCTV cameras of any country and new laws are constantly passed which make things less private. It's probably not going to make me move but I don't like it.



anna-banana
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 30 Aug 2008
Age: 41
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,682
Location: Europe

27 Apr 2009, 4:09 pm

yeah they want to enforce the same thing in here too. I smell another ridiculous EU policy here...


_________________
not a bug - a feature.


Coadunate
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 13 Aug 2008
Age: 67
Gender: Male
Posts: 640
Location: S. California

27 Apr 2009, 11:48 pm

No it’s more like “Colossus: The Forbin Project”. No human mind or minds can monitor all the conversation that goes on twenty-four hours a day, every day. Hence the need for a super computer.



ZEGH8578
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 14 Feb 2009
Age: 42
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,532

28 Apr 2009, 9:48 am

Coadunate wrote:
No it’s more like “Colossus: The Forbin Project”. No human mind or minds can monitor all the conversation that goes on twenty-four hours a day, every day. Hence the need for a super computer.


yeah. i love when dusty old politicians think out clever little surveilance ideas like that. "why dont we just monitor all their chats?" "there cant possibly be more than a hundred people world wide using this complicated and difficult computer-system, right?"


_________________
''In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.''


Ichinin
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 3 Apr 2009
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,653
Location: A cold place with lots of blondes.

28 Apr 2009, 2:59 pm

Mass monitoring of the internet is nothing new.

And its not that they are going to look at everything, they will search for keywords and do trafic analysis. A rather pointless thing since most terrorists/foreign intelligence agencies are smart enough to encrypt their messages - they are not idiots.

Embassies on the other hand are run by idiots, they think anonymity is sufficient, but it isnt like some researcher showed recently when he installed a TOR exit node and used a promiscous network sniffer to analyse the data, which revealed amongst other things passwords to email accounts and the said documents that went back and forth.

Then he wanted to warn the world that anyone could compromise their communications in this way. His reward for doing so? Jail... :roll:


_________________
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring" (Carl Sagan)